Ratcliffe Shoots Down Claim That Three Chinese Balloons Crossed Over U.S. Under Trump | The Daily...

As leaky as the previous administration was and as savvy as the main stream media was to shine a spotlight on that administration, it's hard to fathom one incident happening unrevealed, much less three times

I was about to lambaste the press about relying on anonymous sources again, but decided to check the Pentagon's press site.

It doesn't say who it was, but a spokesperson at the Pentagon did in fact say, "PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time. We spoke directly with Chinese officials through multiple channels, but rather than address their intrusion into our airspace, the PRC put out an explanation that lacked any credibility."*

I listened to an interview on State of the Union with SEN Rubio* where the previous balloons were brought up. His comment was that "Are we aware? Have we seen the Chinese fly these balloons in the past? Yes. I think there are even Twitter pictures of it at one point off the coast of the US down South somewhere. The existence of the balloons is not a mystery to people in that field. What we've never seen, what is unprecedented, and whoever is the source at the Department of Defense would have to acknowledge is unprecedented is a balloon flight that entered over Idaho and flew over Montana and all these sensitive military installations, Air Force bases, ICBM fields, right across the middle of the country. That has never happened before. That is unprecedented. That it flew briefly over some part of the U.S., continental U.S., that's one thing. But what we saw this week - that's unprecedented."

A couple of things on the Rubio comments.
1) He really likes the word unprecedented (almost on par with with VP Harris' fascination with 'time')
2) He didn't flatly deny it might have happened at least once, but indicates that it was a 'brief' encounter.
3) I have to give props to Tapper. He allowed SEN Rubio to actually respond to the question unlike his compatriot at ABC on This Week* that made a comment about the previous incidents and then cut him off and ended the interview just as he started to respond (and of course some highly unethical/partisan outlets started running with "See! He didn't deny it so it must be true!" type of stories).
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* https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3288618/senior-defense-official-and-senior-military-official-hold-an-off-camera-on-back/
* https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/02/05/marco-rubio-suspected-spy-balloon-trump-administration-sotu-vpx.cnn
* https://news.yahoo.com/marco-rubio-told-trump-let-184338644.html

They can assess atmospheric weather, vertical profile